Expert Round-up: Time Management Horror Stories by Business Owners and Managers

Trick or treat?

Or a spine-chilling horror story about time that gets out of control and raises the devil?

To make this Halloween even spookier, we’ve rounded up seven time management tales of terror that will make you shudder. Entrepreneurs and leaders who have told them wish they had not been real. But – they will certainly teach you and your team how to manage time more wisely on a company level.

7 Deadly Horrors of Managing Time and What You Can Learn From Them

Are you afraid of the dark?

Join the Midnight Society of business founders and managers gathered around this virtual “fire” today to share their scary stories about dealing with time.

1. Time Management Horror Tale of The Lost Souls

Have you ever missed scheduled meetings with your customers (castaway and confused), never returning to you after that?

This is what happened with Stephan Baldwin, Founder of Assisted Living.

Story

“Years ago, after creating the Assisted Living Center, I experienced a time management disaster that taught me a great lesson.

Back then, I wrote down the dates and times of appointments in my notepad. You can imagine what a bummer it was when I lost my notes with over twenty scheduled meetings. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember all of them. It was a PR disaster for a new business start-up because I let down several clients who wanted to speak to a senior living advisor to help them choose the right community for their loved ones.”
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Moral

According to Zippia, 82% of people do practically nothing to manage time adequately, sometimes only having a handwritten note.

Stephan Baldwin once contributed to these staggering statistics and lost clients. After that terrible experience, he switched to modern ways to manage client appointments and make every slot count.

Online scheduling software like TIMIFY can offer a wide variety of appointment booking types to your liking:

• One slot per customer: One slot is only for one customer.
• Spontaneous scheduling: Integration of walk-in customers into your calendar.
• Custom: Booking personalised meetings.
• Double bookings: Two people can book the same time slot where the appoinent format allows.
• Group scheduling: Multiple customers can book a slot, such as a group meeting or class, and reserve guest slots, too.
  tment format allows.

2. Time Management Horror Tale of The Poisonous Potion

Aside from the cauldron, you’ll need the following ingredients: fluxweed (harvested under a full moon), knotgrass, leeches, lacewing flies (stewed for 21 days), shredded boomslang’s skin, powdered bicorn horn + some bits of hair.

That’s how you would make the Polyjuice Potion if you were a wizard, knowing what to do first, when exactly to wave your wand, when to heat it, when to let it brew for X minutes, and when to stir it clockwise or counter-clockwise not to turn it into a lethal liquid (a wave  to all Harry Potter fans).

But how should you handle a pile of tasks on your to-do list to control your workday and avoid a toxic workload if you’re a manager?

Read another scary story about time management by Ryan Hammill, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Ancient Language Institute, and find the answer afterward.

Story

“In the mid-summer, we were preparing a new Latin course plus a 10-day Ancient Greek immersion camp. For the latter, we were to conduct video interviews with the potential student applicants.

The plan went wrong because we concentrated on other, less critical tasks and nearly messed everything up when the interviewing process had to start. The camp was about to end in a fiasco because of poor time management, and the team had to work extra over several days to get everything ready in time.

From that moment on, we started applying the Eisenhower task matrix.”

Moral

The Eisenhower Matrix for prioritizing tasks can help you build efficient team schedules and organise activities according to their priority:

• Important, urgent
• Important, not urgent
• Not important, urgent
• Not urgent, not important

3. Time Management Horror Tale About The Person of Ashes

Can you hear the screams echoing from your office rooms (or the other side of the screen, in case you work remotely)?

These may be your employees burning out amid the workload crisis.

Based on Microsoft’s report, 53% of managers and 48% of employees feel burned out in the workplace.

Alex Milligan, Co-founder & CMO of NuggMD, was too late to notice employee burnout and paid a monster price for that.

Story

“This happened long ago, but it still stirs my feelings as I recall it.

Due to inconsistent time management and organizational flaws at the company, one of our medical practitioners burned out and decided to quit, taking time to recover from exhaustion and renew health. We had to say goodbye to a valuable and effective team member.

Now, as we provide medical marijuana consultations via telemedicine, we use an automated in-app system for booking appointments with doctors. The decision to implement digital booking was the turning point for preventing burnout. It relieved stress and workload from our healthcare workers, enabling them to manage their time slots and take breaks in between."

Moral

Indeed, healthcare professionals are at greater risk of mental health problems due to stress and fatigue. That’s when online medical schedules should come into play. Digital appointment scheduling transforms the healthcare industry and arms anyone working in it with practical methods for avoiding excessive overload.

Don’t forget about two-way communication and a continuous feedback loop in your team. A communicative environment can help you reduce worker burnout by 300%.

4. Time Management Horror Tale of Ghostly Hours in The Horrific Rabbit Hole

Taken from Alice in Wonderland, a children’s book by Lewis Carroll, the phrase a rabbit hole denotes a situation or phenomenon that kindles your interest but then sucks you into confusion and chaos and leaves you disoriented in time.

Tom Golubovich, Head of Marketing & Media Relations at Ninja Transfers, knows how it feels. He tells his story of vanished hours.

Story

“More often or not, we all make time management mistakes.

Our team recently made one when preparing a marketing campaign for DTF transfers. We wanted to make our Halloween email stand out. As a result, we squandered too much time on social media scrolling in the pursuit of inspiring examples.

Eventually, we sent our Halloween message to newsletter subscribers, but it was a hasty, last-minute decision because we were pressed for time.”

He adds, “Social media is a powerful distractor for many people. Our marketing team wasn’t an exception when we tumbled down that rabbit hole and let hours slip through our fingers.”
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Moral

The teaching point here lies in steering away from distractors to increase your team productivity:

• Social media
• Smartphone notifications
• Uncontrollable email checking
• Chatty coworkers
• Office noise
• Unnecessary meetings, etc.

For noisy coworkers and other office-related distractions, you can use earphones or headphones. For blocking out online distractions, such website blockers as SelfControl App or Freedom.to can become your saviors.

5. Time Management Horror Tale of The Night-Crawler

Picture this:

You’re peacefully sleeping and having a fabulous dream. But then, oh goodness! A terrible sound breaks through and makes you jump out of the bed.

What might have happened?!

Is it a gigantic monster crawling into your window, or is your team member calling you on a work-related issue?

The chances are high that it would be the second variant for you. Just like it was for one of the employees from Industry Arabic, according to this story from the translation agency’s Co-Founder, Will Ward.

Story

“It was noon in the office. But it was nearly midnight on the other side of the Earth, where one of our coworkers was already sleeping.

The translation project manager forgot about the difference in time, called the translator during her off-hours, and scared her out of her wits.”
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Moral

Improper time zone management in a global remote team can lead to a broken communication mechanism, planning challenges, downtimes, and delays.

That is why it is necessary to establish effective remote teamwork coordination and asynchronous communication across multiple time zones.

With TIMIFY, it’s possible to get a clear picture of everyone’s availability and make changes to the schedule in real-time.

6. Time Management Horror Tale of The Mortal Infection

The next time you complain about catching a cold, remember: you can be struck by an even more gruesome virus.

Nah-ah, not a coronavirus.

It’s a hurry sickness – a chronic feeling of time pressure, worrying about being behind and rushing to finish tasks as soon as possible.

In recruitment, for example, such a rush to close the vacancy can result in a bad hire and end up costing you a fortune . It once infected the hiring team of Checkr, says Linda Shaffer, Chief People Operations Officer at the company.

Story

“Hurry sickness is one of the time management nightmares that often strike unnoticeably.

It crawled into our team while recruiting a senior software engineer for our tool. We hurried and didn’t wait for the international employment history check results. The candidate got hired, but a week later, it turned out they had lied in the resume about working for the most recognizable companies all over the globe. We wasted our efforts, time, and money for onboarding the candidate and later had to restart the hiring procedure again.”

Moral

Hey, slow it down.

Urgency kills productivity by affecting time and resource management. When it comes to hiring, in particular, you can optimise the process with a recruitment scheduling tool to hire better and faster without making a mistake over a new open position.

7. Time Management Horror Tale of Taking a Coffee Break Coffin Break

Let’s put everything off and have a fang-tastic time over a cup of coffee with biscuits (or without those, it doesn’t matter)!

How about hanging out with your team in the office kitchen or via a virtual chat, sharing hilarious memes, choking with laughter, and spilling coffee over your keyboard (yeah, we’ve been there)? Every. Single. Hour. Until the deadline comes, and you have only minutes left to finish the job.

It smells like procrastination.

And it’s the last frightening tale about ineffective time distribution shared by Kevin Le Gall, Owner and Lead Editor at Climbing House.

Story

“One of our contributing authors at Climbing House used to take from 6 to 8 coffee breaks per day, postponing the rock climbing guides till the last day. Naturally, the night before the deadline was dedicated to writing without a break. Sometimes, procrastination resulted in missed deadlines. Other times, we required additional article revision.

As of today, the writer is trying to fight the procrastinator inside. And the attempts are very promising: fewer delayed articles and revisions.”
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Moral

Procrastination is your deadly enemy. It’s like a blood-sucking vampire that gets out of the coffin, takes away your potential, and kills your time.

You can easily beat procrastination and become more productive with these tips:

• Set bite-sized goals
• Break large tasks into smaller chunks
• Remove distractions
• Implement rewards for job completion
• Use an online team calendar to schedule breaks. (Yup, you’ve read it correctly; you should even schedule breaks.)

Leave Your Time Management Fears Behind With TIMIFY

Tick-tock! Your reading time is up.

Pumpkins are gleaming, black cats are prowling, and werewolves are howling. But we hope time management horrors will never chase you anymore.

Use one magic tool to ensure you can ward off the demonic spirits of poorly managed time. It’s TIMIFY – a perfect blend of everything in one place: room and resource management, appointment bookings, and service management.

Protect yourself from failures in arranging your working time with TIMIFY.

And we witch you a boo-tiful Halloween!